Second City’s 80th revue (in roughly half that many years) is called Party Today (Panic Tomorrow), and its opening number shows its six writer-performers partying and panicking like crazy. They show and tell us how to have a social blast while awaiting a nuclear one. It’s a messy sketch and not very funny, as perhaps befits its subject. That consideration, however, is no consolation.

Happily, the show then forsakes topicality (who wants to hear another Trump joke anyway?) in favour of what Second City has nearly always done best: satire of human relationships, social and personal. They start with a raucous scene in which a fractious couple (Ann Pornel and Devon Hyland) play charades against their more happily married friends, and win every round; this is promising but, a besetting City sin, peters out. But they shortly follow it with a more refined and far more successful variation on the same theme: a sweeter-tongued couple (Hyland again, partnered with Nadine Djoury) at odds over their sleeping arrangements. It’s the smartest routine of the evening.

But there are others. Brandon Hackett, an impressive but under-used talent, gets his break as a rapper apologizing in reakneck succession for offensive lines in his songs and then apologizing for his apologies. Allana Reoch, in a lovely bit of cross-gender casting, plays a bride’s father, who can only express his affection for his daughter by invoking his beloved Blue Jays; this is touching as well as funny. The three women breach the (male) audience’s defences, first by stripping, then by expatiating on their own bodily imperfections.

A family conference via Skype disintegrates under the weight of each member’s personal preoccupations. A sadistic game show has some saintly contestants thrown, literally, to the wolves. And Colin Munch curls up to play a sorrowful banana (a plaintive plantain?), and plays him very well. The show’s ending returns, abruptly, to its beginning, but nobody’s perfect.

Party Today (Panic Tomorrow) runs indefinitely at The Second City, Toronto.